Archive for the ‘word press themes’ Category

Wordpress Themes and How Color Effects Buying Habits

Sunday, March 7th, 2010


When you are looking at Wordpress themes and trying to figure out which color would best suit your website, consider the psychological effects of color. In Western psychology, color produce a psychological effect on viewers. Viewers may associate qualities with a color and color may be symbolic as well.

When choosing colors, you can choose one color as the main color or you can chose a main color with other accent colors. One main color with two accent colors is a good combination if you want a livelier palette for your website than just a single color.

The warm colors of the color wheel can affect viewers because of the strength of these colors. These warm colors can overwhelm your website’s content unless they are used with moderation. Unlike the mellow blues and greens, the warm colors beg for attention. Yellow will grab the eye and may be distracting if it is overused. In color psychology, yellow can be motivating and sometimes over-stimulating. In studies, tempers were lost easier and babies cried more in yellow rooms.

Orange can spark the appetite in viewers. If you wish to whet the appetite of your visitors, use orange in your Wordpress theme. It will look fresh and natural while it rings the lunch bell in reader’s minds. Red is another exciting warm color. Red can cause the heart rate and breathing to quicken and can over-stimulate too if it overwhelms a website. You should use the warm colors as accent colors because of the strength of their visual effect.

The cool colors of the color wheel has a more soothing effect. Green is symbolic color for many people. Symbolically, green has a few meanings. Green can symbolize money, prosperity, growth, youth, nature and freshness. As a color choice for a website, green is a lively color that does not cause eye strain. The color green has a relaxing effect on its viewers. Dark green is often seen as a masculine or woodsy color.

The color blue is associated with masculinity and it is often associated with authority. Websites that present information and want to be seen as an authority on the subject can do well to use blue as a main color. Blue is a favorite color with many people because of its tranquil appearance.

Neutral colors such as gray, brown, black and white have meanings for viewers too. Gray projects authority and stability. Brown presents an earthy and honest quality that could be considered homespun or earthy. Black means power, authority and knowledge for many viewers. Black sometimes have negative connotations for some viewers. On the other hand, white represents purity and neutrality.

Wordpress themes can be used because of the effects that the color will have on the website viewers. If you choose a Wordpress theme with the right color, your website will have the effect on viewers that you want instead of affecting viewers in such a way that they are over-stimulated or uninspired. Color is a powerful element when it comes to the design of your Wordpress website.

The Latest On WordPress Themes

Sunday, February 28th, 2010


As WordPress and blogging become more and more popular, the list of customization options continues to grow. One can attribute that to each user wanting his or her blog to be unique or very much personalized. Who knows, one day a theme can be just as unique as the blog’s author! The following is an overview of the latest developments on WordPress themes.

WordPress Widgets

The blog software developer has recently come up with an edition of this plug-in for the full-version WordPress. A Widget here refers to those tools you can use to modify your site—its sidebar, design, or general layout—without having to know and use HTML codes. About a hundred Widgets are featured in the WordPress Widgets blog, and they are classified in categories such as photography, music, discussion, video, income, and links, among others. It is a fun and easy way of customizing your site, so that it features everything you care about, and nothing you don’t.

Not all themes are ready for these Widgets, however, and some modifications need to be done to include this fun feature in the sites that make use of such themes. http://Automattic.com gives full instructions on how to go about making your WordPress site Widget-friendly. WordPress is continuously adding to their already-vast selection of Widgets to suit their user’s whims and personalities.

Canvas Plugin

This blogger-friendly plugin has recently allowed blog users to create their very own theme for their WordPress blog. The good news is that this plugin allows users a pretty good level of customization without them having to study and use codes. The result: a site that looks very professional built within the range of a few minutes to a couple of hours. Even better news is that this plugin comes for free.

This stand-alone plugin opens up to a bare starting point, with a selection of blocks that you can include in your layout by drag-and-drop method. Among the many features of Canvas are Banner, RSS, Static Text, Feature, Digg, Flickr, Random Tagline, Comment, Category List, Asides, Archive, Description, Calendar, Search, Post, and Navigation functions. Meanwhile, an Ink tab gives the user the freedom to determine the styles to be used on the page, sans the need to check the actual stylesheet. This tab proves to be quite useful for beginners, because it features help links that corresponds to each theme component, the style of which you may be about to identify. These links load the template with an indication of the part in question, to give the user a clear idea of what effect the change will have.

“Being Moderated” Notification

It does not come as a surprise that some comments are being moderated by the recipient blog’s owner or moderator. However, it would be nice for you to let your eager comment writers know that you have received their comment, when the system is programmed to delay posting of comments on your blog until it has been read and approved by you. Without this notification activated, some of your readers may think that their comment just got lost and they’ll have to write their comment all over again, when in fact your blog has secured it and it’s only waiting for your approval. However, the blog author may need to be familiar with code to activate this feature. Nevertheless, it is one way to deter comment spammers from infiltrating your blog. Your may also word the notification in your liking. Here’s an example: “Thank you for your comment. It may take a while before your comment may be published. Please check back later.”

More Themes to Match Content

While it is all up to the blog author to decide, it would be quite useful to have a theme that will give first-time readers of your blog a pretty good idea of what to expect by simply looking at the design in use. For this reason, WordPress theme designers are coming up with more specific themes to match a variety of specific types of content. Experts say that the first several seconds spent by a visitor on your blog determine the impression they get of your site. So if your site fails to capture attention right away, then it’s most likely that you’re losing potential repeat readers or site visits.

When designing your site or choosing the appropriate theme, keep in mind that the first concern of a site visitor is whether or not the site has the kind of information needed by him or her. The visual elements, being much faster to grasp than the textual, will help in a big way. If the theme you choose does not correspond to the general content of your site, then attracting more followers will need more effort. Whether we like it or not, looks matter for a lot of people, as this is how beliefs and opinions are initially formed.

WordPress Theme Contests

To ensure your steady stream of new themes, WordPress and certain partners have organized theme contests to discover and recognize the best themes that have cropped up lately. Last year even saw several competitions that attracted theme creators and users alike. This year, however, the WordPress camp has witnessed a slowing down in the production of themes, perhaps due to the fading novelty of it all, not discounting the fact that a lot of those who submitted themes before did it for free.

Nevertheless, customization of WordPress blogs still holds quite a lot of promise, with the arrival of new customization features, such as the Canvas and Widgets plugins. It also promises more highly-customizable themes in the future. For now, you would already be missing out on a lot if you are not already trying out the latest WordPress customization plugins. You can also try modifying some basic features, such as whether your front page should show excerpts or the full blog entries, or changing the number of posts that will show up on your blog index, or both. Whatever you choose, there are hundreds of themes available and other options for you to use, to get as close as ever to your most desired look for your blog.

Why Build Your Website Using WordPress?

Sunday, February 7th, 2010


Since 2002, the time when online marketing business got its face transformed, many web platforms emerged but WordPress is the most extensively used application for building your websites.

WordPress is undoubtedly a semantic publishing platform that emphasizes greatly on usability and intuitive web standards. It helps in building a website that can bring success at your finger tips.

What makes WordPress stand class apart?

1) WordPress enables you to alter the format of your website by browsing through the core PHP files and modifying the relevant codes.

2) This publishing platform undergoes upgrades from time to time and the only thing you’re required to do is upgrade the version when there is a potential threat of any security breach.

3) Using WordPress, you can modify your website to a static page that promotes your specific products/services effectively.  This would give your website a very professional look.

4) The platform is quite flexible and it’s too easy to jump from one theme to another. You can also enhance the functionality of your website using its plug-ins and integrate custom programming into the same and that too, absolutely free of cost.

5) It’s an impactful content management system that helps you build great web pages and you can manage considerable audio, video, text etc.

6) It’s also quite easy to create article directories, e-commerce sites, portfolio sites etc. using WordPress.

7) You can easily optimize the content of your website using SEO plug-ins of your WordPress, which would fetch your website higher search engine rankings.

8) The platform entails base source code that interlinks PHP with MySql and hence, quite easy to install. It creates your website in minutes and it’s live & running.

9) WordPress is styled by CSS  and hence all its installations compley with the set web standards.

10) It takes a very less amount of time to deploy any installation process and integrate themes, plug-ins etc. hence, it becomes easy to complete your project on or well before time. Also, it offers cost-effective web solution to individuals and SMEs around the globe, which set up small-scale sites.

There are a number of good web hosting providers that support WordPress Hosting such as LimeDomains, Yahoo!, BlueHost etc. So if you’re planning to set up a site of your own and wish to get your online presence noticed, get started today.